this past year
for the sake of my friends, few though they may be, whose walls will necessarily be overcrowded by the following if i do not do as follows, i am doing something i never wanted to do before, for odd and complicated reasons that at first blush don't bode well for deeper inspection, at least with respect to my motivations therein: i am hiding the following under a . (i'll confess that this decision is entirely selfish on my part, as it allows me to let it all hang out below without feeling guilty about vomiting an entire twenty-posts-to-a-page page's worth of (to any imaginable disinterested person other than myself) not-terribly-interesting minutiae.
we bought a house. it's the weirdest thing. my dad's wife, who died last year, threw his life into complete disarray. or rather her death did. understandably so, one might add. he went from being a multiple-year retiree snow bird looking to buy a house in arizona or environs in which to spend the winters, taking the motorhome back home to seattle to spend summers with family, to being alone. and who wants to buy a house, alone, thousands of miles from one's nearest relations? suffice to say he helped us out with the down payment, there were other arrangements made &c., and long story short my wife and i looked for, picked, inspected, and bought a house in far north seattle last fall, all in a flurry. re-floored and painted the basement in the weeks before moving. undertook the harrowing task of clearing out and cleaning our greenwood apartment, which had been our home for almost exactly six years--the longest, by a fair stretch, i have ever lived anywhere in my life, and still, i am compelled to commit to record, occupying a tender and difficult place in my heart as the absolute best location any of my domiciles has ever occupied--and was--shudder--in dire need of a clear out/scrub down. (and i have to interject here that i did a large portion of said clearing out and cleaning up, due to an arrangement i made with kelly whereby i gave her, as a birthday present, the gift of not ever having to go back to that place [and further have to honor her by admitting that she did, in fact, go back to that place, even after the putative beginning of the gift, and set me down the right path on the most difficult of the clean-up tasks, not to mention doing a goodly portion of it in the process], the evenings of which toilings were made possible only by liberal portions of cheap white wine and drum rolling tobacco) but i digress. it was, eventually, done, and we were, thoroughly and inescapably, now landowners.
landowners. the word has a certain eighteenth century romance to it. and i could wax lyrical about the house itself, the upstairs living room with clean oak hardwood floors and an entire wall of windows looking out onto the balcony overlooking the sport court and sparsely grassed back yard dominated by a truly old and enormous douglas fir (or something, i'm not a tree guy), all of it tidily tucked into the back portion of the lot, and the tree and surrounding evergreen shrubbery, (which is all rather large for the relatively diminutive term 'shrubbery', but, again, not a tree guy) offer almost complete privacy on the aformentioned balcony and (much more crucially) inside the living room, which also features a fireplace with a great little wood burning stove insert that draws and burns beautifully, and provides the loveliest radiating warmth once it gets going.
anyways, that's a huge development in my life in the past year. there are a couple others that bear mention here in my semi-yearly venture into lj-land. one is the book i just published on kindle, and will soon be publishing as a paperback. i hope you'll forgive my repetition here from my last post, but i relish the words. the past ten years of my posts here are riddled with references to writing, publishing, self-publishing, and most voluminously no doubt my own agonies and indecisions regarding same. well, in the past year i've struck out decisively along a path. my step-dad larry was kind enough to read the one particular book i'd decided to self-publish first, summertime, and give me painstaking notes. everything from simple grammatical/spelling mistakes to awkward phrasings to objectionably repeated words/phrases all the way up to grand overarching critiques of the plot and its various moving parts. my friend akiva also read it for me, and really helped me zero in on, interestingly, a part of the book relevant to a rather more vague (scene-wise) question regarding the plot of larry's, the two combining in a way that gave me the key with which i was able to deconstruct the whole second half of the book (slightly but fundamentally, if that makes any sense) and realign it into a much more effective and plausible whole. (hopefully)
and then, after i'd done the revision this occasioned, larry ready the whole damn thing again, and once again gave me painstaking notes on all the same things. and the crazy thing was that his comments on the plot this second time were much more pointed and firm, but in such a way that it felt like the plot had gained a potency that made his dissection of it that much more engaging, for him. another round of revision on my part ensued, and i'll admit that at this point i was getting ready to be done. i'd already been working on this book, cumulatively, for rather a long time. but, not wanting to be careless, i then printed out the entire thing and read it through with a pen in hand, scratching in changes as i deemed fit. after which came the ritualistic final revision on the computer, which took place at tim's tavern during open mic night (which gave it a certain i don't know what, if you know what i mean), and then i re-entered my life with the ringing thought that i had finished revising the book i was about to publish.
well, it didn't take long for me to pull the trigger. my friend lara had already made me cover art, like a frickin year ago (which is making me doubt my lofty claim above about striking off on a decisive path in the past year) so i was, at that point, perfectly perched, poised at the precipice* of finally by-god self-publishing: all the intervening tasks were done; the only step that remained was to upload it to the website and hit GO. so, not a day later, i ponied up that website and goddamn hit GO. (or 'publish', or whatever)
and then the website told me that i had to wait twelve hours before the book would actually be 'live', which news could have (one might think given the rather high-toned and rapturous tone of the preceding) conceivably given me an impression of anti-climax, even of frustration, except for the strong surge of pure terror that underlay my every sensation. i had just hit GO. there it was, by god, i'd put it out there and anybody or their sainted mother could now go onto the interwebs and download my book and read it and judge me. ...no shit, straight up terror. only years of deliberately and mercilessly beating into submission my own fears (and loves) of LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME, smashing them into a numbed and manageable proportion, allowed me to cruise over the top of the clarion bell of terror and christ almighty talk about high-toned and rapturous. (you can see, perhaps, how much trouble the shallow-breath'ed diva of literary intellectuality that lives somewhere inside me goes to in order to wrap herself in elaborately articulate defensive smoke screens)
it took my wife's repeated urging for me to post the link to my new kindle book on facebook. i had fought myself to a stasis of acceptance that it was out there, published, done and done; but i couldn't quite take that last step (yet) without two pushes, an appeal, and a confirmation. (i said, 'should i really?', she said, 'well, yeah' [as in 'duh'] and i was sufficiently girded to proceed with that most public and decided of soul-barings: the post on facebook.)
---pause for kitty. 'what's up, chuck?'
i'm also planning on recording an album. and i can't believe i'm actually venturing into this subject, after everything i've already written so far. (but i did put it all under a cut tag, so i don't really have to feel guilty about it.) but fuck it. this is my journal, (and even more decidedly so under the cut tag, i must admit), and i'll dispose of it as i please. {john wayne leaves the building} i've been writing songs lately. songs on the guitar, and songs on the piano. writing not only instrumental music, not only melodies, (both of which i've been able to do before), but also, finally, with lyrics. i finally have songs, with all the necessary parts. i've played a goodly portion of the guitar tunes at open mic, and feel pretty solid with them, with respect to their potential as a 'band' type song. because that is my goal, with all of the songs: to arrange full band accompaniments for all of them and record them for posterity.
in fact i have a (or rather had a) play date with ricky to jam on the songs i'm planning to record this coming sunday. i got him to say he'd play on my record with me, and i have another friend, dan, who owns a young recording studio with very reasonable rates, and who also runs sound at one of the hottest open mics in seattle, and thus has more than the usual access to talented musicians. plus i'm not too terribly placed with respect to finding folks who can play. i know people. this is a future project, to be sure, but i am rather well placed to take it somewhere, i can't help but think. i have songs, i have skills, i have connections, and i have taste. it's an open question whether it is good taste or bad, admittedly, but at least the taste is there. regardless, i think i'm rather well placed to take this new project somewhere interesting enough for my requirements.
so that's it. these were the three big topics i wanted to cover in this post. the house, the book, the album. past, present, future, at this particular point in time.
(and i can't wait to meet you when you're sixty years old, looking back at this)
________________________
*gratuitous alliteration, sorry.
we bought a house. it's the weirdest thing. my dad's wife, who died last year, threw his life into complete disarray. or rather her death did. understandably so, one might add. he went from being a multiple-year retiree snow bird looking to buy a house in arizona or environs in which to spend the winters, taking the motorhome back home to seattle to spend summers with family, to being alone. and who wants to buy a house, alone, thousands of miles from one's nearest relations? suffice to say he helped us out with the down payment, there were other arrangements made &c., and long story short my wife and i looked for, picked, inspected, and bought a house in far north seattle last fall, all in a flurry. re-floored and painted the basement in the weeks before moving. undertook the harrowing task of clearing out and cleaning our greenwood apartment, which had been our home for almost exactly six years--the longest, by a fair stretch, i have ever lived anywhere in my life, and still, i am compelled to commit to record, occupying a tender and difficult place in my heart as the absolute best location any of my domiciles has ever occupied--and was--shudder--in dire need of a clear out/scrub down. (and i have to interject here that i did a large portion of said clearing out and cleaning up, due to an arrangement i made with kelly whereby i gave her, as a birthday present, the gift of not ever having to go back to that place [and further have to honor her by admitting that she did, in fact, go back to that place, even after the putative beginning of the gift, and set me down the right path on the most difficult of the clean-up tasks, not to mention doing a goodly portion of it in the process], the evenings of which toilings were made possible only by liberal portions of cheap white wine and drum rolling tobacco) but i digress. it was, eventually, done, and we were, thoroughly and inescapably, now landowners.
landowners. the word has a certain eighteenth century romance to it. and i could wax lyrical about the house itself, the upstairs living room with clean oak hardwood floors and an entire wall of windows looking out onto the balcony overlooking the sport court and sparsely grassed back yard dominated by a truly old and enormous douglas fir (or something, i'm not a tree guy), all of it tidily tucked into the back portion of the lot, and the tree and surrounding evergreen shrubbery, (which is all rather large for the relatively diminutive term 'shrubbery', but, again, not a tree guy) offer almost complete privacy on the aformentioned balcony and (much more crucially) inside the living room, which also features a fireplace with a great little wood burning stove insert that draws and burns beautifully, and provides the loveliest radiating warmth once it gets going.
anyways, that's a huge development in my life in the past year. there are a couple others that bear mention here in my semi-yearly venture into lj-land. one is the book i just published on kindle, and will soon be publishing as a paperback. i hope you'll forgive my repetition here from my last post, but i relish the words. the past ten years of my posts here are riddled with references to writing, publishing, self-publishing, and most voluminously no doubt my own agonies and indecisions regarding same. well, in the past year i've struck out decisively along a path. my step-dad larry was kind enough to read the one particular book i'd decided to self-publish first, summertime, and give me painstaking notes. everything from simple grammatical/spelling mistakes to awkward phrasings to objectionably repeated words/phrases all the way up to grand overarching critiques of the plot and its various moving parts. my friend akiva also read it for me, and really helped me zero in on, interestingly, a part of the book relevant to a rather more vague (scene-wise) question regarding the plot of larry's, the two combining in a way that gave me the key with which i was able to deconstruct the whole second half of the book (slightly but fundamentally, if that makes any sense) and realign it into a much more effective and plausible whole. (hopefully)
and then, after i'd done the revision this occasioned, larry ready the whole damn thing again, and once again gave me painstaking notes on all the same things. and the crazy thing was that his comments on the plot this second time were much more pointed and firm, but in such a way that it felt like the plot had gained a potency that made his dissection of it that much more engaging, for him. another round of revision on my part ensued, and i'll admit that at this point i was getting ready to be done. i'd already been working on this book, cumulatively, for rather a long time. but, not wanting to be careless, i then printed out the entire thing and read it through with a pen in hand, scratching in changes as i deemed fit. after which came the ritualistic final revision on the computer, which took place at tim's tavern during open mic night (which gave it a certain i don't know what, if you know what i mean), and then i re-entered my life with the ringing thought that i had finished revising the book i was about to publish.
well, it didn't take long for me to pull the trigger. my friend lara had already made me cover art, like a frickin year ago (which is making me doubt my lofty claim above about striking off on a decisive path in the past year) so i was, at that point, perfectly perched, poised at the precipice* of finally by-god self-publishing: all the intervening tasks were done; the only step that remained was to upload it to the website and hit GO. so, not a day later, i ponied up that website and goddamn hit GO. (or 'publish', or whatever)
and then the website told me that i had to wait twelve hours before the book would actually be 'live', which news could have (one might think given the rather high-toned and rapturous tone of the preceding) conceivably given me an impression of anti-climax, even of frustration, except for the strong surge of pure terror that underlay my every sensation. i had just hit GO. there it was, by god, i'd put it out there and anybody or their sainted mother could now go onto the interwebs and download my book and read it and judge me. ...no shit, straight up terror. only years of deliberately and mercilessly beating into submission my own fears (and loves) of LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME, smashing them into a numbed and manageable proportion, allowed me to cruise over the top of the clarion bell of terror and christ almighty talk about high-toned and rapturous. (you can see, perhaps, how much trouble the shallow-breath'ed diva of literary intellectuality that lives somewhere inside me goes to in order to wrap herself in elaborately articulate defensive smoke screens)
it took my wife's repeated urging for me to post the link to my new kindle book on facebook. i had fought myself to a stasis of acceptance that it was out there, published, done and done; but i couldn't quite take that last step (yet) without two pushes, an appeal, and a confirmation. (i said, 'should i really?', she said, 'well, yeah' [as in 'duh'] and i was sufficiently girded to proceed with that most public and decided of soul-barings: the post on facebook.)
---pause for kitty. 'what's up, chuck?'
i'm also planning on recording an album. and i can't believe i'm actually venturing into this subject, after everything i've already written so far. (but i did put it all under a cut tag, so i don't really have to feel guilty about it.) but fuck it. this is my journal, (and even more decidedly so under the cut tag, i must admit), and i'll dispose of it as i please. {john wayne leaves the building} i've been writing songs lately. songs on the guitar, and songs on the piano. writing not only instrumental music, not only melodies, (both of which i've been able to do before), but also, finally, with lyrics. i finally have songs, with all the necessary parts. i've played a goodly portion of the guitar tunes at open mic, and feel pretty solid with them, with respect to their potential as a 'band' type song. because that is my goal, with all of the songs: to arrange full band accompaniments for all of them and record them for posterity.
in fact i have a (or rather had a) play date with ricky to jam on the songs i'm planning to record this coming sunday. i got him to say he'd play on my record with me, and i have another friend, dan, who owns a young recording studio with very reasonable rates, and who also runs sound at one of the hottest open mics in seattle, and thus has more than the usual access to talented musicians. plus i'm not too terribly placed with respect to finding folks who can play. i know people. this is a future project, to be sure, but i am rather well placed to take it somewhere, i can't help but think. i have songs, i have skills, i have connections, and i have taste. it's an open question whether it is good taste or bad, admittedly, but at least the taste is there. regardless, i think i'm rather well placed to take this new project somewhere interesting enough for my requirements.
so that's it. these were the three big topics i wanted to cover in this post. the house, the book, the album. past, present, future, at this particular point in time.
(and i can't wait to meet you when you're sixty years old, looking back at this)
________________________
*gratuitous alliteration, sorry.